As you know, I’ve been teaching English at CSU Long Beach for well over ten years now. I’d like to think I have some modicum of wisdom and experience. Nonetheless, I made a very stupid mistake last week, the kind of mistake only an amateur makes. On the morning of Monday, November 7th, a wide-eyed, eighteen-year-old student approached me after class and asked if I planned to vote for Hillary Clinton. “My father’s a little on the conservative side and doesn’t support Hillary at all and… well… he demanded I ask you.” She seemed a little embarrassed when she said this.
I nodded. I tried to be as delicate as possible with the girl while still remaining truthful: “Listen, if it was up to me, I’d be voting for Donald Trump tomorrow just to spread as much chaos in this country as possible. That’s my thing. But you know what would happen if I crossed the ideological line and cast a vote for that joker? Do you know what would happen to me if my dirty little secret got out? This is what would happen: My communist comrades in the English Department would shank me with a sharpened toothbrush in the back nine times in a row in the communal showers on the ninth floor of the McIntosh Building. Did you know that all the professors shower together up on the ninth floor of the McIntosh Building? Well, now you know. The communal bathing chamber looks dank and depressing, a horrible place, like something out of Orange Is the New Black. What’m I supposed to do? You work up such a sweat teaching English Composition every day—you gotta stay clean, right? So I’ll be standing there in the communal showers scraping the Long Beach dirt off my flesh, singing old Woody Guthrie folk tunes, when some long-haired English professor wearing nothing but a black beret will yell out, “J’accuse!” and shank me right in the spine with a No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil, boom boom boom, real fast, just like that. Shank, shank, shank, and it’s all over. There I’ll be, lying in a pool of my own blood, my life essences swirling down the drain, the camera closing in on my unblinking eye as I try not to hear the sound of my bearded colleague yodeling ‘The Internationale’ song so prevalent on CSUcampuses these days.” I performed an enthusiastic rendition of the stirring refrain, just in case the girl wasn’t familiar with it: “‘C'est la lutte finale / Groupons-nous et demain / L'Internationale / Sera le genre humain!’” I balled my fists at my side and said, “Now tell me:Will I wish I hadn’t voted for Donald Trump at that point? You bet your white ass I will! That’s why I have to vote for Hillary, sister. I have no choice. My very life—and the life of my beloved family—hangs in the balance!”
My student just looked at me for a few moments, mouth agape, then replied, “You professors… you all shower together?”
“A horrid image, is it not? I won’t invite you to see the showers in person, because it’s a sight you’ll never be able to unsee.” Here my voice lowered in a whisper. “But if you want, you can sneak up there after hours and check it out yourself. It’s really wild. The communal showers in the McIntosh Building resemble some nightmarish, black and white, expressionist set used in an unusually depressing Fritz Lang film shot in the 1930s.”
I thought the student was going to say, “Who the hell’s Fritz Lang?” But instead she said, “What the hell’s ‘the 1930s’?”
I sighed and said, “Forget it, comrade. It’s better if you don’t know. Forget we ever had this conversation. There are ears everywhere. Loose lips sink ships and all that.”
She agreed to forget every seditious word my lips had so foolishly uttered.
Alas, little did I know that one of my Marxist colleagues in the Comparative Religion Department had overheard the conversation and would repeat everything I had said to my union rep, a gentleman-enforcer some refer to as “Boris the Hammer.” (Personally, I never called him anything but “Friend.” I swear, I speak nothing but the truth. That is my curse.)
Early the next morning, I was stabbed repeatedly by an unknown assailant while toasting a bagel decorated with an impressionist hammer-and-sickle symbol sold only at the campus commissary.
Now here I lay in the hospital, surrounded by hostile eyes, on death’s door. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to cast my vote on Tuesday the 8th, but apparently there weren’t enough “Boris the Hammers” in this country to prevent Donald Trump’s ignoble victory. Please don’t worry, sir… California went solidly for Hillary, as you well know. My non-vote didn’t affect the outcome in any appreciable way.
Please, President Obama, I beg you: Just leave my family alone. They did nothing to you. And please tell the General Secretary, “The chocolates are in the mail.”
I only wish I had lived long enough to see this editorial in print.
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From Daniel Oberhaus' 11-14-16 Motherboard article entitled "The Fact and Fiction of the NASA EmDrive Paper Leak":
"If humanity ever wants to truly explore the outer reaches of our solar system or travel to other stars, we’re going to have to build a better engine for our spacecraft. In fact, this engine will have to be so good that it will be capable of generating thrust without consuming propellant. That’s right: If we ever want a four-hour trip to the moon or a two-month trip to Mars, we’re going to need a rocket engine that doesn’t need rocket fuel.
"This is the idea behind the radio frequency resonant cavity thruster—otherwise known as EmDrive—a theoretical reactionless engine powered by turning electricity into microwaves and bouncing them around a closed metal funnel.
"The EmDrive has been dismissed as 'impossible' on more than one occasion because it appears to violate Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But if a leaked NASA paper posted online last Saturday is to be believed, then not only are NASA scientists pursuing an EmDrive, but they actually made one that works.
"As detailed in the paper, a team of NASA physicists led by Harold 'Sonny' White and Paul March—both leading figures in exotic propulsion systems—was able to generate thrust in a 'tapered RF test article' (read: EmDrive prototype) during a series of tests at NASA’s Eagleworks Labs at Johnson Space Center in the fall of 2015.
"In essence, the NASA EmDrive in the paper consists of a closed copper cone, the inside of which is being bombarded with microwaves. To test the EmDrive, the researchers powered it with 40, 60, and 80 watts and found that it generated up to 58, 128, and 119 micronewtons of thrust, respectively. Given that this 'anomaly' was still observed by White and his colleagues after accounting for error, this suggests that the results of the experiment show an EmDrive is indeed possible.
"Based on these results, the researchers estimated that their contraption would be capable of generating approximately 1.2 millinewtons of thrust per kilowatt were they to scale up the power input. To put this in perspective, the Hall thruster—one of the most powerful in development and powered by ejecting plasma—generates about 60 millinewtons of thrust per kilowatt.
"'The issue involved here is whether the experiment is seeing something real or not,' Jim Woodward, a physicist at California State-Fullerton, told Motherboard. 'I know Paul [March] does clean work and to be honest, I suspect there may really be something there. But the result they're seeing can't actually be explained in terms of the theory they're proposing. So the question is: what is causing it?'
"Per Newton, if you want to propel a rocket through space, you’re going to have to eject some material in the opposite direction of the rocket’s travel. But an EmDrive appears to generate a reaction without any action—so what gives?
"A number of theories have been floated attempting to explain this ostensible violation of the bedrock of physics. White has been a proponent of the quantum vacuum explanation, which posits that the EmDrive is able to generate thrust by acting on virtual particle pairs that are generated by fluctuations in the quantum vacuum (in this theory, these vacuum fluctuations are created by the electromagnetic field generated by the EmDrive). In essence, the microwaves would be ‘pushing off’ of these virtual particles within the EmDrive cavity to generate the thrust that has been observed by White and his colleagues in EmDrive experiments.
"Another leading explanation is that the EmDrive’s thrust is generated by radiation pressure, a position held by its inventor Roger Shawyer. On this view, when the microwave radiation enters the copper cavity, the radiation pushes against the walls of the EmDrive and generates thrust.
"Yet, according to Woodward, both of these theories are unlikely to be correct for a simple reason: Physics doesn’t allow them."
To read the read of Oberhaus' article, click HERE.
From Jon Austin's 10-18-16 Express article entitled "Max Spiers Investigated 'US Military Paedophile Ring' Before 'Suspicious Death'":
"Max Spiers, 39, who is originally from Canterbury in Kent, travelled to Poland in July to give a talk on conspiracy theories, but was found dead on a sofa in the flat he was staying in.
"Friends claim he died in his Warsaw apartment after vomiting 'black liquid.'
"His
family believe his death was suspicious after the father-of-two
reportedly sent his mother, Vanessa Bates, 63, a text message two days
before he died, which said: 'Your boy's in trouble. If anything happens
to me, investigate.'
"In a rambling interview with Polish YouTube channel
PorozmawiajmyTV, during which he appeared to slur and complained of
being tired a number of times, Mr Spiers talked of his enquiries into
the Presidio Child Development Center run by the US Army in San
Francisco.
"A well-documented scandal broke in 1986, when
allegations of suspected ritual abuse involving 60 children, including
four children that had contracted an std, surfaced from the centre.
"But,
despite so many victims, only one man, Gary Hambright, a civilian
employee of the centre and baptist minister, was charged on 10 counts of
child abuse.
"The San Jose Mercury News reported in 1988 on claims
Lt Col Michael Aquino, who was based at Presido, and the self-confessed
founder of a Satanic church called The Temple of Set, was involved in
the abuse, but despite a police inquiry, no charges were ever brought
against him.
"The case against Mr Hambright was also subsequently dropped after a judge ruled the allegations were too vague."
More importantly... has it already happened here? As a correspondent recently pointed out to me, the phrase "drug lords" in the third paragraph below could easily be replaced with "Targeted Individual" or "scientist" or "journalist" or "writer" or "artist," etc. What follows is a brief excerpt from an 8-26-16 Guardian report entitled "Philippines Police Chief Echoes President's Call to Kill Drug Traffickers": "The Philippines’ police chief has called on drug users to kill
traffickers and burn their homes, escalating the president’s deeply
controversial campaign against drugs, which has claimed about 2,000 lives.
"'Why don’t you give them a visit, pour gasoline on their homes and
set these on fire to register your anger,' Ronald dela Rosa said in a
speech aired on television on Friday.
"'They’re all enjoying your money, money that destroyed your brain.
You know who the drug lords are. Would you like to kill them? Go ahead.
Killing them is allowed because you are the victim.'
"Dela Rosa was speaking on Thursday to several hundred drug users who
had surrendered in the central Philippines. His comments followed those
of the president, Rodrigo Duterte, which have sparked criticism from the United Nations and human rights groups.
"Duterte, 71, won May elections in a landslide on a vow to kill tens
of thousands of suspected criminals in an unprecedented blitz that he
claimed would eliminate illegal drugs in six months. "He promised on the campaign trail that 100,000 people would be killed
and so many bodies would be dumped in Manila Bay that fish would grow
fat from feeding on them.
"Days after his election win, Duterte also offered security officials bounties for the bodies of drug dealers.
"When he took office on 30 June, Duterte told a crowd in Manila: 'If
you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting
their parents to do it would be too painful.'
"The UN special rapporteur on summary executions, Agnes Callamard,
said such directives 'amount to incitement to violence and killing, a
crime under international law.'"
"Two companies that operate detention facilities in the U.S. are breaking out.
"Donald
Trump's victory in the presidential elections helped shares of
Corrections Corp. rise as much as 60 percent before paring their surge
to 34 percent by 10:14 a.m. in New York, while GEO Group Inc. was
trading 18 percent higher by the same time.
"Those moves mean the
stocks have recouped some of the losses they've registered since
August, when the Department of Justice said it would start phasing out
privately run jails. Analysts say President Trump would be likely to
reverse that policy, and see an added windfall to the companies stemming
from the difficulty of implementing his deportation agenda.
"'Private
prisons would likely be a clear winner under Trump, as his
administration will likely rescind the DOJ's contract phase-out and ICE
capacity to house detainees will come under further stress,' analysts at
Height Securities LLC wrote in a note published this morning, referring
to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement body by its acronym. Mass
deportation of illegal immigrants would be likely to run into legal
obstacles, 'further necessitating a sizable contract detention
population,' the analysts said."
"American stocks rebounded as traders shrugged off the jitters that
followed Trump’s victory. The S&P 500 rose 1.1 percent to 2,163.26
at 4 p.m., after futures contracts tumbled as much as 5 percent
overnight. The benchmark rallied to a one-month high.
"'We
expect the equity market response to the election result will be
limited,' said David Kostin, chief U.S. equity strategist at Goldman
Sachs Group Inc. 'The U.S. economy has been expanding for seven years
and continues to grow at a subdued pace. We expect the U.S. stock market
will climb slowly during the next few years in line with earnings
growth.'
"WINNERS:
BANKS: rallied as Trump has vowed to reduce regulation
DRUGMAKERS:
surged as Democratic threats of price controls are no longer a concern
with Republicans retaining both houses of Congress
DEFENSE &
INFRASTRUCTURE: Lockheed Martin Corp. and Caterpillar Inc. climbed on
Trump’s pledge to boost spending in both industries
PRISON OPERATORS: Corrections Corp. soared on speculation the new administration will rescind a government contract phase-out
"LOSERS:
INTERNATIONAL TRADE: Coca-Cola Co. and Procter & Gamble Co. retreated
GUNMAKERS:
Sturm Ruger & Co. sank on speculation that fewer people would rush
out to stock up on pistols and rifles with the threat of stronger gun
control laws fading
HOSPITAL OPERATORS: Community Health Systems Inc. sank on speculation Trump will move to repeal Obamacare
CLEAN ENERGY: SunPower Corp. fell on concern Trump will weaken demand for renewable energy"
